Wednesday, October 14, 2015

How do Republicans Rationalize Gun Violence? The Just-World Fallacy and Authoritarianism

When there is a gun massacre in the United States, Republicans and the
NRA default to a predictable set of wantonly cruel, insensitive, and absurd
talking points. This is a well practiced and tired script whose goal is to
derail policies that would treat gun violence as a major public health issue which
kills and maims tens of thousands of Americas every year.

The disinformation about gun violence that is circulated by
conservatives and the NRA is based on a macabre and grotesque logic which
treats mass shootings (and other types of gun crimes) as a natural fixture of
life in the United States.
For gun obsessives, gun violence is like the weather or gravity. It is
immutable and largely outside of the control of human beings.

As such, gun violence and mass shootings are a mercurial and
fickle god, one to which the NRA and Republican Party eagerly makes blood
sacrifices.

In this moral framework the victims of gun violence are
ultimately responsible for their own suffering.

The children at Sandy Hook
surely could have done something to stop Adam Lanza. The 20 students and 6 teachers
at Sandy HookElementary School could have done
something to save themselves. The 12 people killed in Aurora, Colorado
must have had some other option than be shot full of holes by James Eagan
Holmes. The Jews in Europe, and by implication black chattel slaves in the United States,
could have saved themselves from death and suffering. If only they had a gun!

Many Americans of conscience are simultaneously aghast at
and numb towards the country’s gun violence. In such a state of paralysis, they
are not asking essential questions about how a worldview where victims are
blamed for their own deaths impacts almost every aspect of American society.

What type of political vision is offered by such ghoulish
thinking? What type of world does such a framework create?

The Republican Party’s instinctive defense of guns is part
of a larger political cosmology, one that is ruled by the
just-world theory:

The just-world phenomenon is a term
referring to people's tendency to believe that the world is just and that
people get what they deserve. Because people want to believe that the world is
fair, they will look for ways to explain or rationalize away injustice - often
by blaming the victim.

Those with this belief tend to
think that when bad things happen to people, it is because these individuals
are bad people or have done something to deserve their misfortune.

Conversely, this belief also leads
people to think that when good things happen to people it is because those
individuals are good and deserving of their happy fortune.

The just-world theory is also a fallacy. It also encourages
authoritarianism and social dominance behavior. As shown
scholars working at HarvardUniversity and UCLA:

Zick Rubin of HarvardUniversity
and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA have conducted surveys to examine the
characteristics of people with strong beliefs in a just world. They found that
people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be
more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire
political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have
negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups. To a lesser but still
significant degree, the believers in a just world tend to "feel less of a
need to engage in activities to change society or to alleviate plight of social
victims."

Ironically, then, the belief in a
just world may take the place of a genuine commitment to justice. For some
people, it is simply easier to assume that forces beyond their control mete out
justice. When that occurs, the result may be the abdication of personal
responsibility, acquiescence in the face of suffering and misfortune, and
indifference towards injustice. Taken to the extreme, indifference can result
in the institutionalization of injustice.

This political worldview is centered on a type of
Right-wing, Ayn Randian, neoliberal, individualism that has little to no regard
for the Common Good, or a fundamental belief in the merits of community, the
necessity of a humane society, rejects human dignity, and denies the inherent
worth of the public commons.

As understood by American conservatives, poor people suffer
because they deserve it. Innocent black people are killed by cops because they
must have somehow provoked it.

Today’s conservatives, with their just-world fallacies and
authoritarian impulses, want to destroy the social safety net because the poor—racialized
as black and brown lazy moochers; gendered as “welfare queens” or fecund
“illegal” immigrants—are “useless eaters” who only want to take resources from
White America. They are the “takers” in Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment or
the black Americans who only want free stuff as suggested by Jeb Bush and his
use of Reagan’s white supremacist Southern Strategy.

The culture of cruelty and meanness that is legitimated by a
just-world fallacy in which victims are blamed for their being killed in mass
shootings also targets the white poor, working classes, and elderly as well. For
example, when Republicans such as 2016 GOP presidential primary candidate John
Kasich say that those people who depend on Social Security for some
semblance of human dignity and survival in their advanced age “need to get over”
having fewer benefits, he is signaling to their disposability.

In stark and undeniable ways the just-world fallacy and its
authoritarianism looms over the color line. If gun fetishists and conservatives
are willing to stand mute and inactive when white children are massacred in Newtown, Connecticut,
they most certainly will show no sympathy or empathy when the black and brown
body is made to suffer. Eric
Garner screams that “I can’t breathe” while being choked to death on video
by New York
cops. Trayvon Martin is shot dead by a man who is now further revealed by his
actions to be a racist. Michael Brown is killed by Darren Wilson, a white cop, and a
confessed racist, for the Jim Crow era crime of “bumptious
walking”.

And again, the just-world fallacy, now further aided by the
White Gaze, deems that those black men “must have done something to deserve”
being killed by a white identified street vigilante, or cops who work for
police departments with significant and documented patterns of anti-black and
brown racial discrimination. Of course, the American legal system, as the
enforcer of the new Jim and Jane Crow, frees those police and vigilantes of any
culpability.

The psychopathic behavior of the United States abroad is also
enabled by the just-world theory. When the United States and its agents torture
human beings as part of the “War on Terror”, kill
50 innocent people to “neutralize” one “terrorist”, or incinerate people as
they lay in hospital beds while receiving care from Doctors Without Borders,
the outcomes are often rationalized with a logic wherein those victims are made
responsible for their own suffering.

The just-world theory and the authoritarian worldview it
helps to create robs human beings of their capacity for empathy across lines of
race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nation.

America’s
mass shootings and gun violence are not phenomena that are best understood in
isolation. They are part of a larger pattern of behavior. America has
long been, and remains, in a social and political crisis. If the United States
is in decline, then the just-world fallacy, creeping and present
authoritarianism, and the culture
of cruelty and neoliberalism, are the heavy weights pulling it down as a
real “we the people democracy” is snuffed out by the plutocrats and the other
members of the 1 percent.

In all, gun violence is a secondary symptom of a deeper
cultural and political cancer in the United States. Because Americans
are socialized to only think of the individual--and are thus made blind to
systems of power--they are now caught largely unawares…and it may be too late
to save them.

Tips and Support Are Always Welcome

Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.

I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.

My writing has also been featured by Newsweek, The New York Daily News, Raw Story, The Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

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